Death of the “Free Internet Myth”
Death of the “Free Internet Myth”

Summary/Abstract: The completely free content of the Internet and World Wide Web is either in the process of dying or may be already dead. As harsh as this proclamation may sound, this is what some of the statistics of World Wide Web content show. Although the Internet still remains the promising information source and is in many ways the forum for free expression (as it has many technological advantages over traditional media, either print or electronic), we witness the impact of the rise of the media conglomerates and the process in which the global media market in the last decade is dominated by fewer and fewer companies (currently from six to eight – dependant from where we put the threshold for revenues and how we characterize their domestic/global media activities). At present there is more convincing evidence that this process is inevitable even for the web and is already materializing. The purpose is to challenge the myth that many people believe in about the endless freedoms of expression that we are enjoying over the Internet. Even as technological breakthroughs in the last years (the spread of YouTube and personal community websites like MySpace or Facebook) give us hope for the future with regard to the users participation.

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